


in, out

by woodlands



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lots of metaphors about breathing, M/M, Nightmares, Season/Series 04, Specifically Thomas’ apparent suicide in Bethlem, back from the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:54:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25253428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodlands/pseuds/woodlands
Summary: Flint, in the wake of Silver's drowning.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/John Silver, Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Madi/John Silver
Comments: 22
Kudos: 74





	in, out

**Author's Note:**

> we didn't get an embrace between silver and flint when silver came back from the dead and it was, frankly, criminal.

“Kiss me,” Flint says, desperate, and Silver runs him through with his blade.

—

It is early evening on New Providence Island. 

He is thinking of loss. The sound Thomas must have made when he hung himself in Bethlem. The way Silver’s hair must have danced a slow waltz in the water as he drowned. Both gasping for air and finding none. The lungs in Thomas’s chest: pinched, empty. Silver’s much too full. 

His grief for Silver is fresh and acute, a new blade set to an old scar. He is fighting to keep it from sinking in too deep. Experience tells him it is not a battle he will win, but to retreat or surrender would be catastrophic and he does not allow it. He cannot lean on Madi Scott the way he had with Miranda, after Thomas. He cannot lock himself in his cabin and drink it away. It was a relief, in a way, to fight outside himself at the Underhill plantation, even if that relief only lasts for a moment, just long enough for someone else’s blood to dry under his fingernails.

Madi joins him on the porch of Miranda’s house. Her men settle nearby, their presence both a threat and a comfort. They are fiercely loyal to her, and she to them. Flint thinks: you are the only person he ever loved. Take my grief. You have more right to it than I.

They stand together in silence. The island is never quiet, and the buzz of insect and avian life around them feels oppressive. Madi’s skirt sways slightly in the breeze. 

“Did my father ever come here?” she asks.

“To this house?” He twists a ring around his finger. “Richard Guthrie convalesced here for some time. Your father visited with Eleanor at least once. I wasn’t present.”

She nods. “I was just a girl when I left this island. I have no fondness for it. But it is, in a way, a link to him.” Her lips pinch together. “And, I suppose, to John.”

“He has never been to this house either,” he says, because he can’t bring himself to ask the question: what does it feel like to call him that, to say _John_ like the name Silver is a foreign taste on your tongue?

\--

Thomas’s hands are gentle on the pistol, the barrel a careful pressure where it touches Flint’s skin. “I love you,” he says, and his smile is kind. The bullet is kind, too, when it is unleashed.

\--

He has borne the yoke of Captain for so long that the weight of it feels grounding. It is a simple thing to lead the men. They want to follow. He loses himself in the minutiae of rebellion--the building of a camp, the organizing of sentries, the tallying of ammunition. He thinks about Billy. He thinks about tomorrow, and the next day. The day after that.

He pictures Silver as he saw him last, helping Madi down the side of the ship. Body flung violently into the water.

He pictures Thomas as he might have been, striding out on the deck of a ship in the Nassau harbor. 

He cleans his pistol and makes ready, as always, for war.

\--

Silver is looping the noose around his own neck and pulling his dark curls free. Beside him, Thomas is struggling for air in the murky depths. 

Flint cannot stop himself from turning from them. His boots echo on the stones.

\--

The red coat of the British regular is a threat, meant to inspire fear and awe in enemies of the state. James McGraw cloaked himself in that symbolism in the Navy and he understood his place in the world because of it. The uniform builds the man into something bigger than himself, creates for the man a mythos to inhabit.

It also removes it. The man whose neck he slits near the Wrecks has no name, no story. He has come from nowhere, and has no reason to be here. He does not make a sound except for the heavy drop of his body to the sand. His death is significant only because it reveals to Flint the dark form of John Silver in the dunes. In this way, the man’s death is also monumental.

Silver puts his hand out when the man next to him raises his pistol. The man lowers his arm, which is how Flint first knows Silver is real, able to affect tangible change during daylight, not just in his nightmares. He steps forward. The sun is blinding.

“Took you long enough,” Silver says when he is standing. The smile on his face is muted compared to those he flashed when he first joined the Walrus’ crew, but it is unbearably bright to Flint, who cannot look away. 

He comes to a halt an arm’s length away, hand resting on his pistol. “You haven’t drowned.”

Silver huffs a laugh. “No, I haven’t.” He looks tired. He sways, a little, on the stick he is using as a crutch.

It is not Flint’s intent to step forward, but his body has acted on instinct alone since Silver sunk beneath the waves and it does so again now. Silver’s arm, when it comes up around him, is rough, yanking him close. No one has touched him with any gentleness in a long time, and no one is about to start now.

Silver’s hair is damp with sweat and his body trembles just a little from trying to balance on inadequate support. Flint wonders if he’s eaten, then marvels at the thought--the dead do not eat anything in Hell, but Silver, somehow, is not dead. He risks a hand at the back of Silver’s neck, the pads of his forefinger and thumb brushing skin through his curls. This close, it is hard to tell whether the push and pull of Silver’s chest is self-propelled, or simply a call and response to the breath in Flint’s own lungs. Perhaps, for now, it doesn’t matter.

Later, he watches Madi press her tearful face to Silver’s. This can be enough, to raise Silver from the dead so that he can love her. To watch them kiss. For Silver to have something good.

\--

When Silver levels his pistol at him in the forest of Skeleton Island, he is breathing. There is just a sliver of skin between his dark shirt and the tangle of his beard, and it moves with his breath and every torturous, impossible word.

Silver puts the chains on him himself, and his hands shake against his skin. “I hope you understand this someday,” he says. 

But Flint is already drowning, and there is nothing to comprehend in the deep.

\--

Thomas is standing in the dirt and breathing. In, out, in, out, in. There is nothing around his neck. The collar of his shirt stands open, the skin at his clavicle brown from the sun, unshaven, unbroken. There is no rope burn, nor bruising. He has never touched a pistol.

When James reaches him he does not gasp for air. His body is steady. His hands, when they touch James’ neck, are firm. 

He takes the air from James when they kiss. He gives it back.

In, out, in, out. In.

**Author's Note:**

> still hollering into the void about john silver over on [tumblr dot com](https://halewoods.tumblr.com)!


End file.
